Evidence of meeting #110 for Industry, Science and Technology in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was publishers.
3 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy
On that note, thank you very much. On the friendly side, we're going to move to Mr. Sheehan.
You have five minutes.
May 9th, 2018 / 3 p.m.
Liberal
Terry Sheehan Liberal Sault Ste. Marie, ON
We'll fix that right away.
First of all, thank you very much to all our presenters. It's great to take the proverbial show on the road. It allows us to hear from particular regions of the country that perhaps we wouldn't hear from or hear from them in a different way. It's always good to have a face to face and this sort of round table discussion, because we can pick up on a lot of things that we would sometimes miss in other ways.
I'm going to begin with Susan from the Toronto Public Library.
The public library started out using and conceived of the Kanopy document, the one that is provided free to your membership. From what I understand, you're basically increasing your capacity to engage in digital lending for written, for videos, and for other things.
Is the Copyright Act as it is sufficiently flexible to accommodate your practices and what you're thinking about for the future for your library?
3:05 p.m.
Director, Collections and Membership Services, Toronto Public Library
As I said, we have the Access Copyright licence, which is certainly sufficient, I would say, for most public libraries. If it's sufficient for us, given our size, I would say it's sufficient for most public libraries.
Unlike academic publishing, we're seeing a huge increase and spending more and more money every year on e-books and e-audiobooks, and those are things our public is demanding. We're certainly seeing a growth, both in downloadable and streaming. Videos are also another big area. Print is flat. The reason we're able to continue to purchase the amount of print we do is because DVDs are falling rapidly, so we're able to shift our funds into e-books and e-audiobooks. For us, it's an ever-growing market. It goes up 20% to 30% year after year after year. E-audiobooks especially are in a huge period of growth now, and it's the same for publishers: it's the biggest format growth that they're dealing with right now.
3:05 p.m.
Liberal
Terry Sheehan Liberal Sault Ste. Marie, ON
Are you concerned that Kanopy could amount to a free version of Netflix, and then ultimately that would be depriving copyright owners of a source of revenue?
3:05 p.m.
Director, Collections and Membership Services, Toronto Public Library
I would say no, unfortunately, from my point of view.
In terms of our video streaming and downloading products—we also have one called Hoopla—you don't get the kind of material you get on Netflix. On Netflix you don't even get premier feature content, and you certainly don't get that on these services. Kanopy has only documentaries. Hoopla has second-tier feature films and a lot of children's material. They're popular, but there literally is not any competition, I would say, with the major moviemakers.
We've talked to our vendors about that, and the cost of acquiring any kind of service at a Netflix level would be astronomical, so I don't see that as an issue.
3:05 p.m.
Liberal
Terry Sheehan Liberal Sault Ste. Marie, ON
Perhaps, Bill, you would like to make a comment on the comparison. Do you agree or disagree with that statement?
3:05 p.m.
Chair, Canadian Copyright Institute
Well, I use Kanopy all the time. I watched Call Me By Your Name three days ago on Kanopy. That seems to me to be pretty.... I don't know what the arrangements are, but I love Kanopy. I never thought of it as mostly documentaries.
3:05 p.m.
Director, Collections and Membership Services, Toronto Public Library
It's primarily documentaries, but there are a few international features. It's based on a pay-per-use model, so it's very expensive for the library. We have to limit the number of downloads or streaming that somebody can watch in a month. We just launched it this year, and we're watching the growth increasing and the price increasing, so we'll probably be limiting it more and more.
3:05 p.m.
Liberal
Terry Sheehan Liberal Sault Ste. Marie, ON
Bill mentioned the course pack that the union president had referenced, but I'm going to ask the University of Guelph, which is in the region, to comment about the course pack that has been developed and is used in the universities. There's trepidation on one side that it infringes copyright. I just want to hear your perspective on it.
3:05 p.m.
Chief Information Officer and Chief Librarian, Chief Librarian's Office, University of Guelph
The reality with course packs is that their use and production have dropped precipitously over time. I have a data point here: for the summer of 2017, only a single course pack was produced for us, and there were only a handful in the fall and winter semesters, so that is a trend that's happening and has been happening.
3:05 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy
Thank you very much.
We're going to move to Mr. Jeneroux. You have five minutes.
3:05 p.m.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Ms. Martin, you made some comments earlier that copies are being made on behalf of students. I don't disagree with you, but I'm just curious as to how you know that. What's the mechanism by which you know that these copies are just being made on behalf of students?
3:10 p.m.
Copyright Officer and Manager, E-Learning and Reserve Services, University of Guelph
That's the work I actually do. We go in. When instructors ask for content to be made available for a course, our electronic reserves management system is integrated with the learning management system, and we copyright-clear all the content that needs to be made available for courses. It's posted, and those copies are made on behalf of the students.
Essentially, we act on behalf of the instructors in making that content available, but it would also apply and always has applied when an instructor made, for instance, print copies of something to hand out in class. That was permitted under fair dealing. In fact, it's something that always happened. We had fair dealing guidelines that allowed instructors to make copies for students.
3:10 p.m.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
I'm not saying that it's not happening that way, but I'm just looking more at what you call an electronic resource management system and how that works. We heard in Halifax a few days ago, it's called the syllabus service that the University of New Brunswick.... Are you familiar with that service?
3:10 p.m.
Copyright Officer and Manager, E-Learning and Reserve Services, University of Guelph
Yes, it essentially works the same as electronics reserves. The instructor gives you their syllabus or they give you the list of the items that they want made available for their class, and then we facilitate those being made available. The vast majority of those are linked directly to content on the digital platforms that we have licensed.
There are actually only a small percentage—16% of all readings provided to students on campus—that are actually copied using the fair dealing exception. The remainder are all direct links to licensed content, content freely available on the Internet, or faculty-created content.
3:10 p.m.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
Okay.
Ms. Graham, you made a comment—maybe it was an answer to Mr. Jowhari's question—about fewer students taking arts and humanities degrees. Is that because of what's happening with fair dealing with copyright, or is that just a product of circumstance?
3:10 p.m.
Chief Information Officer and Chief Librarian, Chief Librarian's Office, University of Guelph
I certainly think there's been a trend at Guelph, and I don't think it's unique to Guelph. A reduced number of students are going into our College of Arts. The correlation that I was making, which is in part...I don't think there's a single cause and effect here. I think another possible cause is a reduction in the number of students pursuing arts and humanities degrees, thereby reducing the amount of content being asked for by instructors—especially creative literary content—that we would have been providing five or 10 years ago when the numbers were higher.
3:10 p.m.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
You're not saying that there are fewer students taking it because of what's happening. I just wanted to make that clear.
Ms. Caron, let's go back to Mr. Sheehan's question on Kanopy. I think we almost got to it there, but could you lay out again how the creators of the titles are effectively compensated by Kanopy?
3:10 p.m.
Director, Collections and Membership Services, Toronto Public Library
We buy Kanopy, obviously, through the vendor, and what the compensation is between the creator and Kanopy itself is one of the things that we, as libraries, really don't know. The same thing is true of OverDrive, which is the premier worldwide provider of e-books for libraries. We've actually talked to publishers who don't understand how much they are getting paid from Overdrive or what the agreement is. It's a very grey area because instead of just buying your book directly from the publisher or even through a library vendor where it's very clear, you have that third party who is between you and the publisher.
What happens within that realm is very difficult. As I was saying, we asked them, for example, why we cannot get access to Canadian titles that American libraries have access to, like Louise Penny's books. We don't have access to them, yet they're in American libraries. When we ask, they say, “Well, we forgot to negotiate the Canadian rights”, which is no answer at all.
3:15 p.m.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
I think there's a lot more to go into there. The chair is cutting me off.
Can you tell us who your vendor is, so we can do some research?
3:15 p.m.
Director, Collections and Membership Services, Toronto Public Library
The e-book vendor? It's OverDrive.
3:15 p.m.
Liberal
3:15 p.m.
Liberal
Mary Ng Liberal Markham—Thornhill, ON
Thank you. I think I'm going to share a bit of the time with Mr. Sheehan.
I'm just going to pick up on a slightly different point that Mr. Jeneroux started. When we were in—I think it was Halifax, although it might have been Montreal—we heard from someone who had developed a digital platform. It's a digital platform that works with publishers and content producers and allows them to provide to institutions, consumers. It allows them to buy titles without going through a collective or through a package of this sort. What they were doing was they were sharing with us as a possible solution. I think it's a disparity. We're hearing that spending for institutions is going up. We're hearing that publishing revenues overall have not been greatly impacted. We're hearing from content creators that they have absolutely been impacted. So there's a bit of disparity. We also heard that everyone is in support of content creators being compensated for their work. So we are trying to get to what a solution could look like.
I guess I will ask the university for an example. Is that something that you could actually look at? Someone who has come in with a digital solution that provides the works of creators and has a different mode of sale that allows for transactional licences and even something more specific...so that there is a more direct way of being able to provide compensation to the creators. Is that something that institutions could look at? I'm asking the libraries, too.
3:15 p.m.
Chief Information Officer and Chief Librarian, Chief Librarian's Office, University of Guelph
Part of it for us is both the flexibility as well as the efficiency. So while we have a lot of licensed content from five big vendors, some of which do include platforms, we would certainly be open to exploring that as a possibility because it's a model we're somewhat familiar with. As they say, the devil is always in the details. But I do think libraries, certainly academic libraries, fundamentally are not interested in taking money away from creators.